IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 70

Feature
work are courage, truthfulness, and aspiration. In all
these, Aristotle says, the right course is somewhere
between extremes of the characteristic-not a surplus
and not a paucity. For example, an excess of
courage is foolhardiness, and a deficiency is cowardice.
For a roboticist to be truthful, they cannot
turn a blind eye to the harmful effects of automation
and only focus on the good. A virtuous roboticist
would also apply her reason to find excellence in
aspiration: wanting success no matter what the cost
to others would be too ambitious, but having no professional
drive at all would be not ambitious enough.
Not only does a person have to love what is right
to live well, says Aristotle, but she must also have
the ability to foresee likely outcomes of different
choices. Being able to make the choice that leads to
the best outcome is prudence. He says that " . . . it is
impossible to be good in the full sense without prudence,
or to be prudent without moral virtue. " The
virtuous roboticist wants to pursue the welfare of the
public, a stated aim of the IEEE Code of Ethics [41],
and being prudent makes her able to do so.
Given the truth of robots' effects on employment,
it seems that the aspirational and courageous engineer
will, barring extraordinary circumstances that
would make it imprudent to do so, eschew working
with job-replacing technology. Working to bring
about the policies referred to in the earlier section
is also a virtuous action that the engineer living in a
democracy can choose.
Virtue ethics focuses on the agent. The other two
major theories, in contrast, give rules for what constitutes
a right action.
Deontology
As the Age of Enlightenment was drawing to a
close, the Prussian philosopher Kant [42] sought to
establish a purely rational foundation for morality to
both fill a void in human understanding and provide
an incorruptible, universal rule of right behavior.
Kant's position is that a law is only universal if it is
based entirely on logic and thus has nothing of experience
behind it. He wrote in The Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals that, " Everyone must admit
that if a law is to have moral force, i.e. to be the basis
of an obligation, it must carry with it absolute necessity
. . . [that is, be based] a priori simply in the conceptions
of pure reason " [42].
The term deontology refers to a system of ethics
in which adherence to a rule (or set of rules)
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determines the right action. Kant carries the idea of
duty to the rule so far as to say that " in order that
an action should be morally good, it is not enough
that it conforms to the moral law, but it must also be
done for the sake of the law " [42]. A result of Kant's
efforts with pure reason is the categorical imperative,
a rule that he claims serves as the only universal rule
of morality. It is stated as
" Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at
the same time will that it should become a universal
law " [42].
This law is applied by first stating the proposed
course of action as a maxim and then examining the
implications of making that maxim a universal law.
If doing so presents no problems, then the course of
action in question harmonizes with the universal law
of right behavior. Kant provides the following wellknown
hypothetical course of action that fails the
categorical imperative: Suppose a person wants to
get a particular thing and determines the only way to
do so is to ask to borrow it even though she knows
that, once getting the thing, she will never give it
back. To see if this is moral, first express the plan as a
maxim, for example, " If making a promise that I have
no intention of keeping would get me what I want,
then I will do so. " Making this into a universal law
would mean that people would offer false promises
with no hesitation, thus the entire notion of a promise
would become worthless and no one would be
able to accept promises anymore. That universal law
would therefore make itself nonsensical. As stated
above, Kant's position is that an action is right only
if it is done out of duty to the moral law and not out
of a desire for some intended effects. It follows from
this hypothetical scenario that deontology requires
strict honesty. The categorical imperative does not
allow for any rule-bending, even in extreme cases
where, say, a lie might save someone's life. This rigidity
is seen by many as a fault in deontology.
The categorical imperative is now applied to the
roboticist's options to develop job-replacing technology
or not. The following maxim is one possible
expression of the decision to do so: " I will work to
create technology that eliminates jobs. " If made a universal
law, all jobs would eventually be eliminated,
including that of the roboticist, and the law would
have nullified itself. Furthermore, the will of the roboticist
wants to see her need for employment met and
so it could not also have this maxim be universalized.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

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